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Gunpowder

28/10/2017

This dramatisation by BBC 1 of the Gunpowder Plot has just reached its third and final episode. It made the most of its opportunities for swashbuckling, but by and large remained true enough to the history, and was accordingly dark and bloody - too bloody for some complainants; but the graphic was justified not only by the quotidian horror of the period. but as a means of conveying the (misplaced) heroism of the protagonists. In Donald Trump's recent words, they knew what they were signing up to. And after the first episode's gruesome visit to the scaffold, the viewer did too, and wondered the more at the depth of conviction of the characters.
The programme came virtually one week after a history documentary by the delightful Lucy Worseley (as Marmite to some, I know) on the creation of Anglican evensong. Naturally it centred on the work of Tallis and Byrd. Readers of this blog will have seen my posts only a month or two ago about these composers and also touching on Jacobean London. I am bemused at finding that somehow I have unwittingly stumbled into a zeitgeist moment, where themes of faith and the making of English identity have suddenly emerged. It is remarkable how coincidences, odd juxtapositions, sometimes appear, like brief bubbles on an ocean of phenomena. Of course , given the size of that ocean, they are not remarkable at all, but that is our perception.
Meanwhile, my choir has begun its rehearsal of Advent music. Amongst the programme we have Remember, O Thou Man by Thomas Ravenscroft (1582-1633). Ravenscroft is now remembered, if at all, as the collater of several books of popular music, a proportion of which have entered the folk canon; but he wrote or set hymns and psalms too, of which this is one. It has an admonitory tone, and tune, for all its final promise of redemption. It seems to me only too apt for the uncomfortable times the BBC has been illustrating. But in Deutromelia and his other collections we have a useful reminder that there was some light amongst the darkness. For which we can all be thankful.

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Folk Song In England

15/10/2017

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To the best of my knowledge, the last through survey of this subject for the general reader was fifty years ago: A.L.Lloyd's Folk Song In England. I bought a paperback copy soon after it appeared, and it is only now falling apart, despite re-readings.. But does the content still hold together? In the intervening years a lot of ale has been passed under the bridge, and a lot of research come and gone. And now we have Steve Roud's Folk Song In England. The title is a conscious nod to his predecessor.
Steve Roud (pictured here) is a professional librarian, but has dedicated his spare time to folk traditions and music. He is now 68 (a lifetime of learning) the compiler of the uniquely valuable FolkSong Index that bears his name, and the author of, among others, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, and (with Julia Bishop) the newest incarnation of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. This latest book, (with Julia Bishop 's ethnomusicology contribution) is indeed a major survey: in hard covers and 671 pages before you reach the notes and index, it is not recommended for reading in bed.
It seems to me that Steve Roud is trying to change how we, by which I suppose I mean folkies, like to think about traditional music, though the change is already pre-figured in Lloyd's work. The early collectors at the turn of the twentieth century had a feeling that English folk song would vanish for want of their efforts: that they had got to it just in time. And it is true that we owe many fine jewels of the music to their efforts at recovery from the oral tradition. But a study of both Roud and Lloyd soon reveals that a great part of the corpus could be traced to, or located in, written works that pre-date the golden years of Cecil Sharp and his contemporaries. There is a vast collection of antiquarian works, broadside pages, chap-books and songsters in which the material had already been preserved; it gathers dust in such places as the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and the Bodleian (and now accrues virtual dust on the internet). So actually the greater loss would have been the disappearance of English folk song as a living current in modern culture and music: the breaking of the thread that, as I have observed elsewhere in this blog, connects us directly and deeply with our past.
Cecil Sharp thought that folk song was the spontaneous and intuitive exercise of untrained faculties. In some way the early collectors saw this music as arising, like a spring, from some deep collective unconscious. To open Lloyd, and now Roud, is to be soon disabused of this notion: the ideology of primitive romanticism meets an abrupt end when chapter and literally verse can be cited for the origin of most of the work we know and sing today, whether in the sixteenth or nineteenth century or sometime in between.
It has to be said that Steve Roud takes a particular delight in exploding romantic illusions. This must account for the fact that the first third of his book is dedicated to the history of the collectors. All fascinating stuff, but the reader must wait a very long time before consuming the real meat the folkie wants, the story of the songs and music themselves: the stuff which really tickles the palate when you listen to Barbara Allen or The Banks of Sweet Primroses. So compared to Bert Lloyd (who was after all a journalist) Roud's book has a dryish, academic quality, for all its fascination. Lloyd of course had an agenda: he was a product of the thirties, communist, internationalist. But it gives vitality and savour to his writing, and his depth of knowledge seems at least as wide as Roud's. Lloyd has a fondness for placing the music in context both across centuries and continents. Some of this may be fanciful, but it gives his writing richness and depth. It certainly inspired me as a youthful student. Roud permits me to be more cynical about it; but Lloyd's enthusiasm remains a pleasure to read.
Yet context is something important for Steve Roud too: the context in which the music is sung. It is not so much the origin of the song that makes it a folk song but the process it has undergone from the time of its composition (and yes, someone, even if only Anon, did compose it) to the moment when the singer before you reaches the last note. This idea makes the chapter dedicated to historic styles of singing of particular importance, and for all that Lloyd had his own much-parodied singing style, it is not something his book spends much time with. But for Roud the manner and context of performance is the crucial test of whether an item deserves the name of folk song. In this view, our search to find the progenitor of a song, some crowder in a Northumbrian tower, or some street singer in a London stew, matters not at all: the point is how we hear it today: as if in the course of preservation down the years, some unconscious process has acted upon it and it has become of the folk. If you like (and I do) it has become ours. Rather than originating in some collective unconscious, it is absorbed into that unconscious.
A few years ago at the Sidmouth Folk Festival a young woman (who has since become very well known) was introducing on the main stage an outline of Cyril Tawney's little masterpiece, The Grey Funnel Line. It was soon apparent that she was completely unaware of the provenance and history of the song. To her it was just a beautiful song, picked up in a session somewhere. If Tawney had been present, I like to think he would have been flattered by the assumption of his work into the steam of the folk unconscious.
Both Roud (with a large contribution from Julia Bishop) and Lloyd spend chapters on the significance of the ancient modal qualities which the Victorian collectors discovered in many of their songs: up to forty per cent of those collected from oral sources in that period could be categorised in that way. I expect some ethno-musicologist has already analysed the written sources for these works, where they exist, to determine the extent to which the modal quality was present from the outset. But if I can cling a moment to the ship-wreck of romantic illusion, can I think that we are hearing something of what our ancestors expected to hear when they re-made the songs in their own image? That it is an aspect of the English folk process at work? Please?
As for that young lady at Sidmouth: I trust the Performing Right Society caught up with her in the end.

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Richard Durrant

1/10/2017

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I last saw Richard Durrant perform about ten years ago, at the Sidmouth Folk Festival. I realized then that he was the guy two tents from mine on the campsite practicing guitar scales for an hour at a time. The dedication and love of his art showed in the performance, which was both fluid and disciplined, and engaging too, virtuosic in a way that folk artists rarely are, for all their other merits. But this was hardly folk music. Durrant has done the serious classical slog at the RCM, and having mastered it diversified, so that by the time I encountered him he was playing against himself with sequencers and other electronic panopoly, pieces of his own composition and others of mildly adventurous modernists like Steve Reich. He had a willingness to push the boundaries which marked him out, and I was eager to see him again.
At last the opportunity came along in Kingskerswell church last Saturday. This is a rather unlikely venue for a variety of music events, but it reaches out like many such now to recover the lost function of community space. The church interior has an untidy, lived-in air, like the home of an aged relative; but it does seem to have an effective and enthusiastic team, and the barrel-shaped ceiling and the open nave promise well as a concert space.
Richard Durrant made the most of it. For this was quite a different sort of concert from my last of his. Most accoustic artists now rely on electronics of some sort, but Durrant has put all that aside for what he has called his Stringhenge Tour. He relied solely on the power of his two instruments, the classical guitar and the steel-string tenor guitar to make the most of the accoustic possibilities of the venue. And this was right and proper, since the instruments in his hands are stunners in sound and appearance. An elaborate guitar that departs from conventional appearance often does not bode well: you fear the sound has taken second place to the visual aesthetics. In particular, Durrant's classical guitar, made by Gary Southwell, has a back-story. Its back and sides are of bog-oak first grown in East Anglia fens five thousand years ago, and is disceetly decorated with neolithic motifs; and the tenor guitar by Ian Chisholm had a white horse inlaid at the headstock. But the consequence is that the instruments produce Roots music of a very literal sort, which in turn inspired much of the programme we were given. Well, one might except the Bach pieces, save that they were an indication of the artist's own musical roots and in performing which he clearly draws upon a major source of inspiration for his own compositions. His Bog-Oak Bach at the close of the first set told the audience a lot about where his heart lies.
But for my ear Durrant was at his most appealing as he moved away from the prescriptions of the Baroque form, and into the imagistic colourings of his own work, heard particularly well after the interval. The Sussex Suite for Tenor Guitar in particular was evocative of a rural England, even as it developed un-English, certainly un-folky, complexities.
On concluding, Durrant got a good ovation, which was as well, for the last treat he had saved for his encore. With the tenor guitar he played and ambled slowly up and around the nave and back to the chancel, while the sound remained consistent in volume and tone from whichever direction it came. It lulled and invigorated at once, like a warm shower. It's a tribute to the performer and to the venue, that the old church could be played upon just so.
Link: The guitars can be seen to best advantage on Richard Durrant's own website: <a href="richarddurrant.com/discover/stringehenge/ </a>

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Gunpowder

Folk Song In England

Richard Durrant

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